Without much fanfare, earlier this week Jeff Gerth, a Pulitzer-Prize winning former New York Times investigative reporter, dropped a thorough and damning four-part article dissecting the media's obsessive reporting on Donald Trump's alleged collusion with Russia.
Even more surprising, Gerth's report, "The press versus the president," appeared at the in-house organ of America's most prestigious journalism school, Columbia Journalism Review, which has long been regarded as something of an unofficial ombudsman for the media industry.
On Twitter, Glenn Greenwald, a left-leaning reporter who made some significant career sacrifices for calling out the media's bogus reporting on this topic, declared Gerth's reporting "Absolutely devastating on how casually, frequently, recklessly and eagerly the press lied on Russiagate." Gerth lays out what happened so clearly that it's hard to imagine fair-minded readers who make it through all 24,000 words of Gerth's report would conclude any differently.
Gerth does point out that Russiagate has led to an erosion of trust in the media and offers a pallid warning that the media's "Failure will almost certainly shape the coverage of what lies ahead." But this is inadequate.
Devoid of any broader context about the long history manipulations of America's national security state or the corporate media's evolution into ham-fisted left-wing ideologues, one can read Gerth's dry reporting as a comedy of errors: A bunch of well-intentioned reporters, faced with the challenge of covering a problematic president - and disingenuous Democrats and partisan law enforcement officials - kept bungling the reporting, by getting key facts wrong and committing serious sins of omission.
Finally, no accounting of the media's faulty Russia reporting would be complete without seriously evaluating the consequences.
So while Gerth's careful reporting is noted and appreciated, it is unlikely to produce the kind of self-examination and reckoning necessary to restore trust in the media and the vital role they play in the democratic process.
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